stood outside their houses, looking in-
tently down streets.
On an expressway near the western
edge of town, soldiers aimed guns from
behind guardrails. Qgddafi's men were
over there, they said, pointing toward a
residential neighborhood about two
miles from the city center. An armored
column of soldiers had come forward
from Ajdabiya during the night; they
attacked just before dawn, first taking
the university, on the western outskirts
of town, and then pressing on into the
city. Friends told me that they were
trapped in their houses as tanks fought
outside. Some of the troops invaded
an affluent neighborhood, Tabalino,
where, residents said, armed Qgddafi
supporters entered the fray as if on a
prearranged signal. Finally, along the
road near the university, Qgddafi's
forces were stopped by an army of
shabab, local men, and Islamist fighters.
There was a tremendous firefight, and
several dozen people were killed before
the Qgddafi column withdrew to the
city's outskirts. As for the downed
plane, word had begun to circulate
that it was the rebels' only remaining
fighter, shot down by mistake. The
pilot had ejected, but too late to save
himself:
A few hours after the fighting
stopped, I noticed columns of smoke
coming from the area where Qgddafi's
force was said to be. French bombers
had made the first air strike of the
no-fly resolution. It would prove to be
a turning point in the war, but most
people in Benghazi were too distracted
by the threat of Qgddafi's troops to
celebrate. On newscasts, the French
claimed to have destroyed a couple of
armored vehicles outside the city. ''Just
two? What about the rest?" everyone
asked.
By late afternoon, the area around
the university was teeming with civil-
ian men and boys who had come to see
what had happened. There were incin-
erated vehicles and torn-up roadside
shade trees and bullet-pocked build-
ings. At the on-ramp to the express-
way leading to the city center was a
burnt-out tank, with people crawling
in and out of its turret hatch. Where
shells had hit apartment buildings,
gaping holes showed their interiors. A
young, shocked-looking man wan-
50
THE NEW YORKER, MAY 9, 2011
dered around, telling his story to any-
one who would listen. He had been
abducted by the advancing Qgddafi
forces the evening before on the road
from Benghazi to Ajdabiya; they had
bound and beaten him-his hands and
face were swollen and bloodied-and
brought him to Benghazi, where he es-
caped during the fighting.
face but watched my eyes closely as he
spoke.
The man in the other cot moved in
his sleep, and his blanket fell away, ex-
posing his back. It was covered with
scores of ugly puncture wounds, as if
from a shrapnel blast. He seemed to be
drugged; his eyes were closed, and he
groaned softly. The guard shook him
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Rebels greet Osama ben Sadik, who returned from America to help their cause.
At Jala Hospital, downtown, some
fifty bodies-fighters and civilians-
were piled up in the morgue. In a room
at the entrance with a caged window,
the bodies of a dozen Qgddafi fighters
lay on the concrete floor; among them
were the dirty, bullet-riddled corpses of
several dark-skinned young men-sus-
pected mercenaries. A crowd of curious
men stared down at them and made
harsh remarks.
A guard took me to a secure back
room where rebel intelligence agents
were interrogating a pair of wounded
enemy soldiers. When they were done,
he showed me in. One man was lying
on his back, with an I.V. drip attached
to his arm. He had been shot six times,
he told me, wincing. He was a soldier
from Sabha, a town in Libyàs interior
where Qgddafi has many loyalists.
After the uprising, he had been taken
to a special military camp near Surt,
where a force was assembled to attack
Benghazi. The soldiers were told that
their mission was to rescue the city
from AI Qgeda extremists and drug ad-
dicts. He told me this with a straight
roughly and demanded he speak to me.
I said to let him sleep. Afterward, I
asked the guard why he had treated the
two prisoners differently. He said that
the soldier from Sabha was an ignorant
man who had believed he was doing his
duty. The second one, however, was a
mercenary, a Libyan who had taken
money to kill his fellow-citizens. The
guard's lip curled with disgust.
That night, the air strikes contin-
ued, as the U.S. military launched more
than a hundred Tomahawk missiles,
wiping out the armored column poised
on Benghazi's outskirts. The city was
electric with the prospect of victory.
Everyone said proudly that the road to
Ajdabiya was a charnel ground, and I
drove out to see it. Beginning just be-
yond the university, near a vast new
Chinese-built apartment complex, the
roadside was strewn with dozens of
tanks and other military vehicles that
had been scorched into blackened
trash. There were bodies, shredded
and burnt, and all kinds of military ref-
use lying around. Within hours, war
tourists were everywhere, posing for